The Tin Man Gets His Heart

1. The Tin Man Gets His Heart Feraco Myth to Science Fiction 17 October 2011

2. Survivors • Gilgamesh and Utnapishtim stay by the shore for an undisclosed amount of time, talking and sitting by the water. • When asked once more how he came to the land across the Sea of Death, Utnapishtim reveals that he, unlike Gilgamesh, did not come to that place or find the life he and his wife lead by his own volition. • He, like Gilgamesh, is a survivor.

3. The Doomed City • We learn of Shurrupak, an ancient city on a different part of the Euphrates. • This was Utnapishtim’s home; in some translations, he was its king. • But the gods and goddesses – everyone in the hierarchy, including “Anu, their aging and weak-minded father; the military Enlil, his adviser; Ishtar, the sensation-craving one…and all the rest” – devise a plan to flood the city. • The reasons why they reach this decision aren’t clear, but their intentions are: the gods aim to wipe out all human life in the city.

4. A Clever God Sends Word • The means by which Utnapishtim learns of the plan vary from translation to translation. • Each method, however, concerns a god named Ea, a clever divinity previously unseen in the epic. • In most translations, Ea comes to Utnapishtim and warns him of the impending cataclysm. • The god instructs him to tear down the walls of his house (remember, we start in a walled city) in order to construct a ship, an ark of sorts. • Utnapishtim is to “abandon [his] possessions and the works that [he] find[s] beautiful and crave[s in order to] save [his] life instead.” • Afterwards, Ea tells him to blame the coming rains on Enlil’s displeasure with him, and that he must leave the city because the god will bar him from it – indeed, that he must leave the earth and travel to the Great Deep (the Waters of Death), where Ea (the only god who can tolerate his presence) resides.

5. Sealed Through Sacrifice • So Utnapishtim builds his great, cubical ship, packs it to the gills with the things he can save – animals, provisions, a couple of volunteers, his family – and closes the door as the water falls from the sky. • In the Mitchell translation, the ship must be sealed from the outside, which means one of the volunteers (not the citizens who didn’t heed Utnapishtim’s warnings) must stay behind. • Utnapishtim leaves him his palace (since his home is now an ark) and everything left inside, which seems like cold comfort until one realizes that we spend our time accumulating possessions when we live our lives in just as doomed a state.

6. One Wonders If They Ever Understand… • The rains fall for six days and seven nights: observant readers will note this is the same amount of time Enkidu spends with Shamhat, and the same amount of time Gilgamesh spends standing over Enkidu’s corpse. • Even the gods ultimately recoil in the face of the utter destruction they’ve shown, for what are (and again this must be stressed) unknown, seemingly arbitrary reasons. • Ishtar even weeps and wails: “O, how could I have wanted to do this to my people?” • Utnapishtim bitterly continues, “They were hers, notice. Even her sorrow was possessive – her spawn that she had killed too soon. Old gods are terrible to look at when they weep, all bloated like spoiled fish. One wonders if they ever understand that they have caused their grief.”

7. Machinations • Here, once more, we see a great cynicism expressed towards the gods’ machinations. • Their cruelty seems random (Mitchell’s translation posits that Enlil sent the flood to annihilate mankind for the sins of some – adding an interesting dimension to Shamash’s war on Enlil’s “sinful” slave of a forest guardian), and their tears in the flood’s aftermath hypocritical. • Yet Utnapishtim complies because he must; to do otherwise is to court annihilation. • And with Utnapishtim’s ark, we see the recurring image of the lonely figure adrift, a survivor floating atop the forces that have ravaged his life – the waters of life (the overburdened Euphrates) for Utnapishtim, the Waters of Death for Gilgamesh.

8. I fell down on the ship’s deck and wept. Why? Why did they have to die? I couldn’t understand. I asked unanswerable questions a child asks when a parent dies – for nothing. Only slowly did I make myself believe – or hope – they might all be swept up in their fragments together and made whole again by some compassionate hand. But my hand was too small to do the gathering. I have only known this feeling since when I look out across the Sea of Death, this pull inside against a littleness – myself – waiting for an upward gesture.

9. To Reach for Nothingness • At first, Utnapishtim is as Gilgamesh was; he refuses to leave the ship, to confront the world, to face the “deaths he knew were there.” • When he does arrive, Enlil and the others are angry to see that some humans survived. • But in the end, the gods assemble for them, and Utnapishtim and his wife are blessed with eternal life because they have survived. • In doing so, both must leave the lives they’ve led behind; to reach backward into the past for it is to reach for nothingness, for our pasts no longer exist…and to ignore the present is to forego living. • So Utnapishtim and his wife are relocated to a place where the rivers begin, far across the Waters of Death, where they will live alone forever, blessed only with the company of each other and the boatman Urshanabi.

10. I Envy You Your Freedom • I would grieve at all that may befall you still if I did not know you must return and bury your own loss, and build your world anew with your own hands. I envy you your freedom. • Utnapishtim then turns to Gilgamesh and asks him pointedly, “Who will assemble the gods for your sake? Who will convince them to grant you the eternal life that you seek? How would they know that you deserve it?” • He tells Gilgamesh that he must pass a simple test: stay awake for seven days. • (Notice this same timeframe – the biblical seven days, at that – appears yet again here.) • As he puts it, “Prevail against sleep, and perhaps you will prevail against death.”

11. Prevail Against Sleep? • Gilgamesh, of course, does not prevail. • No sooner does he sit to begin waiting out his seven days of wakefulness than he blacks out and falls asleep. • Utnapishtim, knowing that Gilgamesh will swear he never slept, orders his wife to bake Gilgamesh a loaf of bread on each morning, leaving it by his side once it’s finished. • When Utnapishtim wakes him after seven days, Gilgamesh protests in the predicted fashion…at which point the aged king points to the stale loaves surrounding him, and asks, “How will you bear eternal life? It is not easy to live like gods.”

12. No Magic Wisdom • Pleading for some way to escape death – which he feels following him at every turn now – Gilgamesh begs for wisdom and insight. • Utnapishtim has none to give him – at least, none he hasn’t already shared. • Irritated by Gilgamesh’s unwillingness to listen to those who would provide him with counsel – for he has received advice from three people, yet seemingly learned nothing – Utnapishtim summons Urshanabi and commands him to take Gilgamesh back to the other shore.

13. Crave Some Word • Gilgamesh hands over his animal pelts, the manifestations of his savage grief; Utnapishtim promptly burns them, which moves the king to tears. • But as Urshanabi begins to sail away, Utnapishtim’s wife asks him to reconsider Gilgamesh’s plight. • “He has come so far. Have you forgotten how grief fastened onto you and made you crave some word, some gesture, once?” • She remembers when he, like Gilgamesh, sought only a balm, not an enlightened phrase, for comfort. • It’s easy, when one feels comfortable and secure, to say that they’d prefer to earn that comfort, rather than have it handed to them. • When one is without these things, she points out, one doesn’t much care how one receives comfort; one only wants the quickest, most efficient means of getting it.

14. Into Its Lines • Utnapishtim says that “youth is very cruel to an old face; it looks into its lines for wisdom so touchingly, but there is nothing there to find.” • But even if he can’t offer Gilgamesh the “wisdom” the other man so desperately wants – and he has given his counterpart plenty of wisdom, just none of the magic-button variety – he can give him one thing. • So he calls to Gilgamesh, and tells him the secret he’s told no one else: that there is a way to defeat death.

15. The Plant and the Possessor • A thorny plant grows from the floor of the river leading into the Sea of Death. • One cannot enter the Waters willingly, swim to those depths, and survive. • But if one could retrieve the plant – a plant whose thorns will gash and wound anyone who touches it – it will give its possessor youth, rolling back the years whenever its owner wishes. • If one possesses it, in short…one could live forever.

16. A Prism of Sunlight • Gilgamesh ties stones to his feet, lets them carry him to the floor, and sees the rosy plant, “shimmering in the water like a prism of sunlight.” • As he rips it from the floor, the plant’s thorns slash his palms to ribbons, but he’s able to cut the ties binding his feet to the stones and float to the surface before the Waters claim him. • He and Urshanabi sail away from Utnapishtim’s home together, carrying the precious cargo – the boon or grail at the end of his long quest.

17. Voyage and Return • Most good voyages feature a return, and Gilgamesh intends to go back to Uruk with his plant – a reborn man in the face of his great loss. • In Mason’s translation, Urshanabi leaves him here; in most others, Urshanabi remains with him until the journey’s end, since Utnapishtim has dismissed him for bringing Gilgamesh across the Sea. • Since Urshanabi is more commonly assumed to remain with Gilgamesh, we will feature him doing so here.

18. Up Comes the Serpent • Gilgamesh is dirty and tired, albeit relieved, at the end of his journey. • When he comes upon a pool of cool, clear water, he sets down the plant and bathes. • But in doing so, he leaves the plant unguarded – as he was bound to at some point, since we all must bathe, eat, and sleep in order to stay alive. • When he does, a serpent, drawn by its sweet smell, approaches the plant and consumes it. • The restorative powers of the plant cause the serpent to shed its skin, and it leaves that old, worn shell behind, departing the scene as a freshly reborn creature.

19. Nothing But a Snake’s Skin • When Gilgamesh returns and finds nothing but a snake’s skin – the chronicle of a life, the physical representation of the memories and experiences we collect and use to define our existences – he sobs, beside himself at having come so far only to lose everything he sought. • But this brings him to the realization Urshanabi, Utnapishtim, Siduri, and even the Scorpion Man tried to reveal to him earlier: that man cannot beat death, and it is futile to try. When that realization takes hold, grief falls away, and only acceptance remains. • That acceptance, in turn, frees him from Humbaba’s and Ishtar’s curses.

20. A Flawed Testament • Our last glimpse of Gilgamesh finds him staring up at the city. • In most of the translations, he’s surveying it with Urshanabi, pointing out to the other man all of the subtleties this monument to his achievements contains; it is a flawed representation of his life (and those of the people around him), forever vulnerable to the weather and the elements, but it is sufficiently imposing to leave Urshanabi awestruck. • For this place, flawed though it may be, is a testament to his life – to being alive – and must therefore be maintained, cared for, watched over…and even loved. • It will outlive him, as all good legacies do.

21. The Meaning of… • If the epic is about growing up, maturing, coming to terms with one’s place in a complicated universe, understanding that one cannot always control one’s fate…then it is also about realizing that the meaning of life lies in building, whether we build walls or cities or relationships. • Yes, time knocks down or buries our constructions in the end – but we live and love anyway, because this is the space that’s been reserved for us – and we can find meaning in the things we can do, particularly when we spend less time obsessing over what we can’t.

22. Greater Than Designed • In short, the fact that life ends doesn’t make it meaningless; it compels us to squeeze the most meaning from our allotted time as we can, and to leave behind something that can outlive us, that can transcend us – that can allow us to strike the final blow in the battle against death, to prove that we can be greater than the universe designed us to be. • In that moment, when Gilgamesh looks at his towering city, he is unburdened of his grief – only for a moment, but still. • For that moment, he comes back to himself; for that moment, he understands love better than he ever had.

23. The Sting of Anything • The poem ends before Gilgamesh’s journey ends, before he fully heals. • We never see him make it all the way back…but we don’t really expect him to. • It’s not realistic to assume that we can ever permanently shrug off grief, no more realistic than it would be to chew that pain forever. • At some point, the sting of almost anything fades; that point varies for each person, but it’s worth reaching.

24. Closing Thoughts • We do not seek to eliminate our ability to grieve; to do so is to trivialize the loss of someone dear to us, not to mention a violation of what it means to experience life rather than simply survive it. • Nor do we seek to nurse our grief forever; to do so is to make someone we loved responsible for unfathomable pain, and to waste time they’ve been denied.

25. Closing Thoughts • No, we seek the best way to honor someone once they leave us, readily or not. • And perhaps our greatest way to honor someone we’ve lost is to hold them close to us once they’re gone, to remind and convince ourselves that we really did love them, that the opportunities we missed don’t negate the ones we shared…and then, gradually, to keep going, to keep growing – to continue living a life that would make them proud of us.